Michael Hudson - Whistleblowers ignored, punished by lenders, dozens of former employees say

http://www.iwatchnews.org/2011/11/22/7461/whistleblowers-ignored-punished-lenders-dozens-former-employees-say

The Great Mortgage Cover-Up

Darcy Parmer ran into trouble soon after she started her job as a fraud analyst at Wells Fargo Bank. Her bosses, she later claimed, were upset that she was, well, finding fraud.

Company officials, she alleged in a lawsuit, berated her for reporting that sales staffers were pushing through mortgage deals based on made-up borrower incomes and other distortions, telling her that she didn’t “see the big picture” and that “it is not your job to fix Wells Fargo.” Management, she claimed, ordered her to stop contacting the company’s ethics hotline.

In the end, she said, Wells Fargo forced her out of her job.

Parmer isn’t alone in claiming she was punished for objecting to fraud in the midst of the nation’s home-loan boom. iWatch News has identified 63 former employees at 20 financial institutions who say they were fired or demoted for reporting fraud or refusing to commit fraud. Their stories were disclosed in whistleblower claims with the U.S. Department of Labor, court documents or interviews with iWatch News.

“We did our jobs. We had integrity,” said Ed Parker, former fraud investigations manager at now-defunct Ameriquest Mortgage Co., a leading subprime lender. “But we were not welcome because we affected the bottom line.”

These ex-employees’ accounts provide evidence that the muzzling of whistleblowers played an important role in allowing corruption to flourish as mortgage lenders and their patrons on Wall Street pumped up loan volume and profits. Codes of silence at many lenders, former employees claim, helped discourage media, regulators and policymakers from taking a hard look at illegal practices that ultimately harmed borrowers, investors and the economy.

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Steven Wishnia - Obama Granted Fewer Requests for Clemency Than Any Other President in the Last Century

Wednesday 23 November 2011

by: Steven Wishnia, AlterNet 

http://www.truth-out.org/obama-granted-fewer-requests-clemency-any-other-president-last-century/1322328265

 President Barack Obama’s Nov. 21 pardons of three marijuana offenders are extremely unlikely to indicate any shift in the White House’s pot policies. The three had already served their sentences.

More important is his commutation of crack dealer Eugenia Jennings’ sentence, the first clemency request Obama has granted since he took office. Groups that advocate eliminating the difference between penalties for crack and powder cocaine pointed to her case as an example of the system’s injustice.

"Her case screamed out for commutation,” said Kara Gotsch of the Sentencing Project in Washington, DC.

Jennings, 34, of Alton, Illinois, will be released next month after serving 10 years in prison. A mother of three children, she was diagnosed with cancer earlier this year. Convicted of selling slightly less than a half-ounce of crack (actually, trading it to an undercover informant for designer clothing), she received a mandatory minimum sentence of 21 years and eight months because she had two previous convictions for selling about a gram of crack.

“Now is that fair? It’s not,” the judge who sentenced her in 2001 stated, “Your whole life has been a life of deprivation, misery, and whippings, and there’s no way to unwind that. But the truth of the matter is it’s not in my hands. As I told you, Congress has determined that the best way to deal with people who are troublesome is we just lock ‘em up.”

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Peter Linebaugh - 451 at Zuccotti Park -- Where man starts by burning books he ends up by burning people

NOVEMBER 25-27, 2011

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/11/25/451-at-zuccotti-park/

by PETER LINEBAUGH

The cowardly, nocturnal destruction of more than 5,000 volumes of “the People’s Library” last week, a repository of knowledge gathered by the Occupy Wall Street assembly at Zuccotti Park requires the most vigorous push-back.   Mayor Bloomberg of New York ordered the destruction which was certainly coordinated with Wall Street and the White House.

Let the number 451 become his license plate; let it become his Social Security Number; let it become the password to his billions; let it become his total ID, for now the world knows him as the one who realized the dystopia of book-burning described in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953) known to every American high school student.

Or, one might liken the destruction at Zuccotti Park to the burning of the books in Germany in 1933.  The German burning inspired a comrade of 1968 to place at the site of the Nazi’s hideous deed a plaque with Heinrich Heine’s words, written in 1821,

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Washington's Blog - Congress to Vote on EXPLICITLY Creating a Police State

By Washington's Blog

November 27, 2011

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=27886

If You Thought Police Brutality Was Bad … Wait Until You See What Congress Wants to Do Next Week The police brutality against peaceful protesters in Berkeley, Davis, Oakland and elsewhere is bad enough. But next week, Congress will vote on explicitly creating a police state. The ACLU’s Washington legislative office explains: The Senate is gearing up for a vote on Monday or Tuesday that goes to the very heart of who we are as Americans. The Senate will be voting on a bill that will direct American military resources not at an enemy shooting at our military in a war zone, but at American citizens and other civilians far from any battlefield — even people in the United States itself. *** The Senate is going to vote on whether Congress will give this president—and every future president — the power to order the military to pick up and imprison without charge or trial civilians anywhere in the world.

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Harriet Washington - Corporations Are Patenting Human Genes and Tissues -- Here's Why That's Terrifying

By Brad Jacobson, AlterNet

Posted on November 23, 2011, Printed on November 26, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/153203/corporations_are_patenting_human_genes_and_tissues_--_here%27s_why_that%27s_terrifying

Do you think that granting corporations the rights of people in the Citizens United case is disturbing? Then contemplate the fact that corporations have been patenting human genes and tissues at alarming rates -- in the last 30 years, more than 40,000 patents have been granted on genes alone.

As the Occupy movement fights against the unmitigated influence of corporations on our lives, author Harriet Washington's new book, Deadly Monopolies: The Shocking Corporate Takeover of Life Itself--And the Consequences for Your Health and Our Medical Future, is a timely wakeup call to protect the very essence of human life from the medical-industrial complex. 

In a recent phone interview with AlterNet, Washington discussed the dark implications of corporate medical patents, how we find ourselves in this nightmarish scenario and what needs to be done to stop medical research profits from trumping human health.

Brad Jacobson: The main piece of legislation that opened the door for corporations to begin patenting human life was the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980. Can you tell us how this law was sold to the American people?

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Ray McGovern - Ask the Candidates Real Questions -- Like These

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Ask-the-Candidates-Real-Qu-by-Ray-McGovern-111125-819.html

November 25, 2011 By Ray McGovern During recent presidential debates, moderators have asked mostly predictable questions and--except for some notable gaffes---have elicited mostly talking-point answers. It's time for citizens to put politicians on the spot with some more pointed questions. Pity the pundits. It must be hard to pretend to be a journalist and live in constant fear of being one question or comment away from joining the jobless. This Thanksgiving holiday weekend we can be thankful for the obscene transparency of the "mainstream" pundits' efforts to avoid at all cost offending the corporations that own and use them. Rather, media personalities who wish to be around for a while must do what they can to promote the notion of American exceptionalism and the need to sacrifice at home in order to defend and expand the Empire -- "so that we don't have to fight them here."

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Nicholas Confessore - Policy-Making Billionaires Privatizing Public Policy

 http://www.truth-out.org/policy-making-billionaires-privatizing-public-policy/1322410134

Saturday 26 November 2011

by: Nicholas Confessore, The New York Times News Service

Over the past 30 years, as the gap between wealthy and poor grew ever wider, total philanthropic giving almost tripled, according to annual estimates published by the Giving USA Foundation and the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University. In an age of widening partisanship and plummeting trust in government, this outpouring of philanthropy has produced a distinct breed of philanthropist: The policy-making billionaire.

Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder, has invested more than $13 billion in public health initiatives around the world through his foundation. William E. Conway Jr., a founder of the Carlyle Group investment company, is planning to give away $1 billion of his personal fortune, and is said to be considering how his money can aid in financing major infrastructure projects.

“What’s going on at a broader level is a sense of, ‘Hey, we can be much more effective and efficient than government in doing things,’ ” said Leslie Lenkowsky, a professor of philanthropic studies and public affairs at Indiana. “And it’s become more pervasive in recent years.”

In keeping with the anti-government spirit of the times, the new philanthropists — some with roots in the loosely libertarian milieu of Silicon Valley or Wall Street — share a disdain for established politics and an impatience with the slow churn of old-fashioned policy making. Last month, the Starbucks executive Howard Schultz, whose net worth approaches $750 million, proposed using Starbucks’ corporate foundation and customer donations to create an economic development and job training program for the unemployed, one that he hopes can generate tens of millions of dollars in loans to small business.

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Tom Weis - Now Is the Time to Fight the Keystone Pipeline

Published on Sunday, November 27, 2011 by the Boulder Daily Camera

http://www.dailycamera.com/ci_19401172

by Tom Weis

Everyone who helped slow down TransCanada's "Keystone XL" tar sands juggernaut -- rural farmers and ranchers, Native Nations, organized labor, elders, faith leaders, youth, environmentalists and others who protested at the White House this summer and fall -- should be proud of what we have accomplished. By bravely standing together and uniting our voices against Big Oil, we forced President Obama to react to our demands. His decision to delay a decision on the pipeline until after the 2012 election is a testament to the power of the people.

But let's not kid ourselves: opponents of Keystone XL have "won" nothing, save more time to organize. Now is not the time for victory celebrations, but for redoubling our efforts to beat back this lethal energy scheme. When you have your opponent staggered and against the ropes, you don't back off and let them recover their strength. You keep on coming until you've landed the knock out punch.

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Eric Boehlert - 7 Things Fox Viewers Are Wildly Misinformed About

By Eric Boehlert, Media Matters for America

Posted on November 25, 2011, Printed on November 26, 2011
http://mediamatters.org/blog/201111220020?frontpage 

The release this week of yet another survey indicating the more you watch Fox News the less they know, has once again shone a spotlight on one of the unique features that defines Rupert Murdoch's cable news outlet - it is very, very good at misinforming people. And it's very bad at reporting the news. In other words: Propaganda? Yes. News? Not so much.

It's true that the most recent survey, conducted by Fairleigh Dickinson University, only polled adults in New Jersey and doesn't represent national indictment against Fox. Nonetheless, the findings created amedia stir because they reinforce what pollsters and academics previously discovered; that one of the country's all-news channels consistently leaves viewers less informed. 

What's stunning is how many different areas of the news and public policy Fox viewers are misinformed about. For instance, the Fairleigh Dickinson survey asked viewers about recent grassroots uprisings in Arab nations [emphasis added]: 

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Bruce Weber - Lynn Margulis, Evolution Theorist, Dies at 73

November 24, 2011

By BRUCE WEBER

Lynn Margulis, a biologist whose work on the origin of cells helped transform the study of evolution, died on Tuesday at her home in Amherst, Mass. She was 73.

She died five days after suffering a hemorrhagic stroke, said Dorion Sagan, a son she had with her first husband, the cosmologist Carl Sagan.

Dr. Margulis had the title of distinguished university professor of geosciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, since 1988. She drew upon earlier, ridiculed ideas when she first promulgated her theory, in the late 1960s, that cells with nuclei, which are known as eukaryotes and include all the cells in the human body, evolved as a result of symbiotic relationships among bacteria.

The hypothesis was a direct challenge to the prevailing neo-Darwinist belief that the primary evolutionary mechanism was random mutation.

Rather, Dr. Margulis argued that a more important mechanism was symbiosis; that is, evolution is a function of organisms that are mutually beneficial growing together to become one and reproducing. The theory undermined significant precepts of the study of evolution, underscoring the idea that evolution began at the level of micro-organisms long before it would be visible at the level of species.

“She talked a lot about the importance of micro-organisms,” said her daughter, Jennifer Margulis. “She called herself a spokesperson for the microcosm.”

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